There is no doubt that monitoring the web for specific terms and brand mentions can be a complex and time consuming tasks at times.
Depending on how big your digital footprint is, it can pretty much become a full-time job if you don’t have the necessary vehicles to deliver and filter the information in an organized manner.
One of the conventional methods many entrepreneurs use to be on top of their brands and specific industry terms is Google Alerts, which does one thing right, it “alerts” you when it finds your terms but…
It is a messy approach, it can fill your inbox in no time, and it doesn’t provide you with the necessary tools to interact with that content.
So I thought I’d share a tool I’ve been using lately to be on top of things, kind of Google Alerts on steroids if you will.
Mention, which by the way was recently nominated as “Startup of the Year” at the TNW Frech Startup Awards, is an application that can be accessed via the web, desktop or iPhone.
It basically lets you create alerts for key terms to monitor your industry, your competitors or your brand mentions. As in Google Alerts, Mention notifies you via email or by push notifications via your system or your mobile device.
But to me the main benefit is to have everything delivered to a dashboard and, have the option to interact with these mentions from one location.
So let’s take a look at some of the features and how to work your way around it.
Creating an Alert
Creating an Alert on Mention is an easy 3-step process.
Step 1: As you can see in the image below, the first step is a simple set up to name your Alert, specifying the term or keywords you want to monitor and selecting the languages.
Step 2: Manage and filter your sources basically means you get to choose whether you want to get alerts from specific media types such as Facebook, Twitter or Blogs or you want to monitor the entire web. Also very useful, you get the option to block any specific URLs you don’t wish to get alerts from.
Step 3: Last step is to connect your Facebook and Twitter accounts to be able to interact with this Alert and share content on those accounts. From here you can also share your alert with team members so you can collaborate.
That’s all you need to do to set up an Alert. It’s really painless!
The Dashboard
The dashboard not only offers a beautiful interface but it’s also a format you are familiar with, specially if you are an Evernote user. It gives you a feed with all the mentions it has a collected for you with a content window to the right.
Another cool feature is the ability to “favorite” or trash specific pieces of content or block a source so you don’t see any more content from that site.
Your Alerts and all its options are on the left panel, from here you can view your favorites and trashed or look at the tasks assigned.
Sharing Content
If you have connected your social accounts to specific Alerts, you have the option to share that content right from the dashboard. This is a huge time-saver.
Monitoring your Brand
Lets take a look at a couple of examples.
One of the things I monitor is my brand, SocialMouths, which is tiny but still gets a few mentions worth tracking. It really doesn’t matter if you think your brand only gets mentioned a few times, you want to make the most out of those but if you’re not aware of them, you miss the chance to interact.
According to the Mention analytics (I’ll talk about it in a second), the term SocialMouths got 3,451 mentions in the last 30 days. Of course a big chunk goes to retweets and you probably don’t want to take action on all of them, but there are also mentions worth following up.
Here is a post originally published on this blog that was aggregated by Marketing Hits. For this search I’m filtering the sources to “Blogs”. This way I also get to see that it was done properly, they posted the content partially and included the source credit. This way I have also found content that was shamelessly stolen.
I was also able to catch this link to a SocialMouths post included in the forum WarriorForum.
Having the window with the actual content right on your dashboard lets you decide in a second if this a mention worth taking action on.
Analytics
Do you really need analytics for this? I’ll give you 3 reasons why is worth looking at them in this case:
- If you are monitoring your own brand, you want to know when and where these mentions are happening, after all, one of the reasons you are in social marketing is to increase your digital footprint.
- If you are measuring a key term in your industry, you also want to know if this topic is even relevant or get a pretty good idea of how much conversation is actually going on around it. Maybe you are not present on forums and it turns out it is worth having a presence there.
- If you are monitoring your competitors, you want to compare their mentions, when and where they happen with your brand mentions. Again, you can discover that your competitors are having success in spaces where you are not even present yet.
Mention gives you a timeline in which you can filter by periods of time, you can also filter by source and language.
Also, a very cool share of voice chart, you can see in the image below how the mentions are distributed by media.
Mobile
Lastly, the advantage of keeping track of your mentions on the go. iPhone and Android apps.
What I’d like to see implemented
The only feature I can think of that i’d love to see on Mention will be the integration with other apps. For example Evernote to be able to save specific content or Buffer to share right from the web dashboard or the mobile app.
It’ll also be nice to be able to connect other social accounts like LinkedIn or Google+ so you can share content there but I also understand the main objective here is to track mentions rather than serving as a sharing platform.
How about you?
Bottom line, if you are not monitoring this kind of stuff, you are probably missing a lot of opportunities to create positive impact with your brand.
Are you tracking brand mentions, your competitors or any important industry key terms? How are you doing it? Share your tricks in the comments!
